


The Devil Makes Work

by ladyvivien



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:22:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyvivien/pseuds/ladyvivien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ruth Evershed comes to two realisations of varying importance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Devil Makes Work

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daygloparker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daygloparker/gifts).



The secondment to Thames House adds three commute-free hours onto her day, and it takes a week for Ruth to get used to all this free time she has at her fingertips. At first she just arrives at work early, goes home late, and spends her evening in her flat roaming restlessly from room to room. But when it becomes clear that the extra hours she’s putting in are causing her to be viewed with suspicion, she adjusts her schedule to include a lie in, an extra long shower with two different types of shower gel, and a cup of overpriced, artificially flavoured coffee bought from Café Nero outside the tube station. Now she still gets to work early enough to show her eagerness – with a sugar and caffeine high to boot – without alienating her colleagues any further.

It doesn’t, however, solve the problem of what to do with her evenings. There’s a list of people as long as her arm that she’s been meaning to catch-up with – old school friends, former colleagues, a cousin on her mother’s side that she quite likes – but after a fortnight spent in a social maelstrom, that gets ticked off as well. Attempted overtures of friendship are either rebuffed or go unnoticed – Sam only has eyes for Danny, and he and Zoe are practically an old married couple even if she refuses to realise it. Malcolm and Colin are equally inseparable. She wonders about them, actually, but if no one else has been tactless enough to enquire, she’s not going to be the first. Secrets, in as much as they’re possible in this metaphorical goldfish bowl, are something to be cherished. Like the fact that she’s contemplated – more than once, actually – bearding the lion in his den and asking Harry Pearce if he fancies a drink after work. He socialises with them occasionally, so it’s not as though the idea is completely barking. Except it is, she reminds herself, because she was the one responsible for leaking confidential information to GCHQ so he has no reason to trust her, let alone like her. The thought shouldn’t bother her quite this much, but it does.

So she contents herself with taking long, ambling walks home, bypassing Westminster tube station and wandering up Whitehall past the Cenotaph and Downing Street and all those corridors of power that rely on people like her even though they prefer to pretend that she doesn’t exist. Past Trafalgar Square with its fountain lit up and the four lions at the foot of Nelson’s column that will always make her think of Narnia and Aslan no matter how many times she walks past them. Sometimes she’ll make a detour to the National Gallery or take a left turn towards Piccadilly Circus and lose herself – and most of her paycheque - in the five floor bookshop for a few hours. But on nights like tonight, when she’s sick of prying through people’s lives and being privy to all the horror human beings can perpetrate on one another, she finds herself drifting into St Martin in the Fields to listen to one of the concerts. Her brain makes a tired, clumsy analogy with Odysseus being lured onto the rocks by the Sirens’ song, but going to church isn’t destructive even if she isn’t terribly religious so she gives up trying to think and lets the music was over her, through her. It’s Verdi tonight, and if she closes her eyes she could be back in her choir at Oxford. She feels at home for the first time in months.

The realisation of what she has to do comes at exactly the same moment as her neighbour elbows her sharply in the ribs, so for a moment she thinks it’s the hand – or arm, really – of God. But when she opens her eyes and an angry white-haired man is glaring at her, she realises that she was singing along softly. Happier than she’s been in a long time, she just smiles at him and inches out of her pew, picking up a flier about the church choir as she leaves.

The light rain doesn’t bother her now, and she feels as though she’s floating down the street until someone stumbles into her. Before she can even apologise, something – maybe the smell of him, perhaps just his comforting, solid presence or, more likely, the way he’s grumbling under his breath – alerts her to his identity. And as she meets an irritated gaze (that softens only slightly when Harry Pearce realises who walked into him) with a mumbled, red-faced apology, she’s blindsided by her second revelation of the day. It’s one that she thinks, when she gets away and can think straight again, she was better off without.

Without fully meaning to, she turns to watch his retreating form until he’s swallowed up in the sea of pedestrians, one more anonymous grey-suited man in a crowd of them, just how he likes it. She can’t do that, can’t blend in with her surroundings. She never could. It should count against her, in this line of work, but who would ever suspect Ruth Evershed, babbler extraordinaire and prone to showing up to work in bright (albeit crumpled and covered in cat hair) colours of being a spy? It’s the perfect double bluff. It helps hide her feelings as well – she’s garrulous at the best of times, stumbling over her words as they rush to get out, blushing when people turn to listen (which they should, she’s bloody brilliant). If she trips over her feet or stammers or turns the colour of a tomato every time he’s nearby then no one will notice, least of all him. It might hurt a little but burying her feelings is nothing new, not in this half-life she’s chosen.

She turns in the other direction, retracing her steps and heading towards the Strand, the rain chilling her suddenly overheated skin. When she gets home, she tells herself, she’ll find a choir with space for another alto, one that practices a few times a week. She’s got far too much time on her hands.


End file.
